What's wrong with the NFL
Note: (Musing follows)
Author Notes about this Blog
This blog was set up originally simply as a file deposit for musings which I sent out to friends. Somehow a lot of people managed to find the URL, and that is ok. Since the blogs were not originally meant for general distribution most have not been carefully edited. I may go back now and do the proper editing. I have recently published a book titled: The Meaning of Life. Anyone interested can find it listed in Amazon.com under the author name Reid S. James. There is a description of the content along with the listing. It was published in late October 2013. Any income from the book will be donated to various 501 category charities. Given the nature of the book, to do otherwise would be hypocritical. Given the original intent of this URL I have never provided an opportunity for any response to these musings. I think I will leave it that way as I don't have the time for a lot of responding to comments by others. These musings are written as food for thought, and do not purport to be anything other than what the blog implies: personal musings. Were I to personally know many of you who visit this URL I sense we would have a lot of engaging conversations. There are too many now for that to be practical.
What's wrong with the NFL
It has always seemed strange to me that our national professional sport teams, with all the fans and money involved, are turned over to a cabal of very wealthy Americans as some sort of personal play toys with little or no regulations/ limitations on these owners, or protections for the fans/players/cities.
As usual, with so many American problems of late, the source of the problem here lies with Congress. They are the ones who exempt these rich owners from anti-trust laws, who exempt them from so many normal constraints and regulations of other corporate entities.
For a start, even if you happen to have a lot of money and can afford to buy a team, you can't unless the current owners vote to allow you. Wow. Next, these professional football teams don't even pay any taxes. Wow. But even if they did it is estimated that the taxes would amount to around 9 million because of all the tax loopholes available to them. Since some players make 20- 30 million a year that generates another Wow.
Only in professional football do you find contracts which are binding only to the player and not the owner. The owner can terminate the player at the end of any season. The player cannot terminate the contract of his own accord. Thus we have weird contracts in which a player makes a certain amount one year, then a little more the next year, then a little more the following year, then a huge increase thereafter. The papers will then read that a player signed a $100 million dollar contract over 6 years. However, after two years the owner can rip up the contract after paying let's say $10 million after two years, thereby avoiding the other $90 million. That's why bonuses exist to sort of soften the potential real consequences down the road. Non-binding contracts to one party is the kind of roguish unfairness one could expect from a monopolistic enterprise operating outside normal laws.
Of course it is hard to feel sorry for players who are making millions of dollars a year, regardless of the salary shenanigans. While this is true for the stars, especially quarterbacks, most of the players suffer all the injury dangers of football without these tremendous salaries. And most players only play a few years. There are players who get their first contract on a gamble by the team. But the owners are smart, they understand this is an opportunity for the player which is limited to their team. So they offer him a 6 year contract starting like at $500,000 per year and ending at $750,000. If the player performers superbly, maybe even making the Pro-Bowl, he remains stuck near the minimum player salary level. Inequities in salaries are rampant throughout the league. And yet the owners promote the notion that it is a team game, that everyone looks out for everyone else, blah-blah-blah. The reality is that the owners look out for themselves and the rest involved in the sport do too. The players understand from the git-go that it is purely a business, a dangerous business injury wise, and that they are well paid (compared to most people) pawns on the owner's plantation. In earlier times Professional football players all received the same salary. Maybe then some real team cohesiveness existed.
The owners do what they want. Who selects the Commissioner? Why of course the owners. The Commissioner is granted all these powers to make decisions about so much in football, but his decisions must favor the owners or the Commissioner is out of his job. Well, one might say, the players have their union. That is true and thus we have a bargaining table which is really unique to football in that there is really no bottom line on salaries or anything else except how much each side gets percentage wise of the huge profits to be made. The owners can't say, "Look, there is only so much money we can spend or we will go out of business. Other corporations have to watch costs. And the player unions are pretty much under the control of those players benefitting the most from the weird and unfair contract system.
The biggest problem is this: The bargaining table in a monopoly like professional football should include a representative of the fans and a representative of the cities in which the teams play. And the huge profits available to the owners should really be something which goes to our major cities across the country. Why should the huge profits from professional football go to select wealthy owners? Why should these select wealthy owners be in a position of black mailing cities to build stadiums for them or they will move elsewhere? These are national sports, and football is the most popular national sport of all. This logically demands that the fans and the cities in which they play (or all major cities) get the profits instead of individual wealthy owners. National sports should always be run in the national interests, not the interests of a handful of wealthy persons.
Major cities, because of the nature of their inhabitants, have real trouble using property taxes to generate enough money for education, transportation, etc. Football games are played in or near major cities and the income from this sport is huge, and huge enough that major cities could use the profits to improve the lot of their citizens.
And fans, were they part of the bargaining table, could establish some limits on player salaries, and support players on a fairer contract system, and ensure that at least some game day tickets are priced such that, through a lottery, some fans on the shallow end of the affluent pool could afford to go to a game. Too many of the game tickets are thrown around by corporations like confetti to themselves and their clients. And maybe the whole concept of season tickets should be examined a bit so the same affluent people can't go to every game while others less affluent cannot go to any game.
National sports should be governed in ways which are fairest to all concerned---the players, the fans, the cities, the affluent and the poor. Fans watch football games on TV and the various commentators never hesitate to promote or character assassinate players and coaches, but they never diss any owner for the simple reason the owners decide which networks get which games to televise and at what price. So we always get the required pan shot of the benevolent owner in his skybox accompanied by the required admiring comments by the commentator. The owners, by nature of being an owner, are beyond any regulations, any limits (oh, I suppose if they murdered a player they might be held accountable), any criticism from the TV booth, and from any obligations to cities and fans.
It is not likely to change since so many of us need these games to add some excitement to our lives. Were all of the above to be logical and correct, reality is another story. Ok, granted, but there was also a time when certain people had to sit in the back of the bus and that reality got changed.
Professional football, along with basketball, has turned the term student athlete into a farce. There are no minor leagues in football and thus any high school student blessed with enough ability to play football has to, if necessary, pretend they are college material. Many universities make huge profits from football and basketball while the college athletes are told to act like they are as poor as any other student.
Why in hell should a young man who is an excellent football player and a poor student be required to attend a college or university and be both. Anyone remotely aware of how much time it takes to train and practice for college football or basketball is aware that even good students cannot find adequate time for their studies and for a poor student this would be an impossible task. But everyone involved pretends otherwise and through an array of gimmicks, manages to create the illusion that these poor students who are excellent athletes are also legitimate college students. The solution is simple---in the absence of minor leagues let colleges and universities recruit athletes for their athletic teams and each athlete can choose whether he/she wants to take any courses or just a couple. If you want to give a break to a prospective athlete who is a weak student then guarantee him enrollment after his athletic career is over, whether his career be a short time or a long time.
There is always this talk of team unity and good teammates and how each athlete should help and be a support base for all other teammates. When is the last time in football management kept an athlete on the roster because he was a good teammate? If this is such an important factor a lot more 'potentially' great teammates should try out for teams. Every player on the team knows it is his own stats which determine his salary and whether he is first string, second string, or is retained on the team. Of course most teammates get along like they do on most any other jobs. Particular individuals may simply have to tolerate each other. Many really good athletes who had the ability, the focus, and the determination to be great were on teams precisely because the could perform well on game day. Dennis Rodman, Allen Iverson, Terrell Owens come to mind amongst many others.
Whether players are a good citizen is another matter. People who engage in repetitive criminal acts should not be eligible to play on national sport teams.
And it should not be up to the owners to decide this. With owners greed invariably trumps fairness. In some states a person with a criminal record cannot vote but is entitled to play sports and make millions. It ought to be reversed, a convicted criminal (of certain kind of crimes) should still be allowed to vote but not participate in professional sports. It is hardly surprising that the owners, most of whom are ancient relics from a much earlier culture, would decide drunken binges, physical assaults, and so on are tolerable up a point, while smoking marijuana can result in dismissal. Marijuana is certainly not a performance enhancing drug, at least not if it's potential to reduce the stress that comes with professional football is ignored. In professional football, the owners can run out of the sport a Ricky Williams and tolerate players with a history of violence until the courts finally put some of them in jail. There is no law whatsoever that football owners must put marijuana on the list of drugs to be tested for. From a medical standpoint there is no comparison on the toxicity of alcohol and nicotine compared to marijuana. But the owners like the image of being considered so pure and tough about 'proper' activities.
One of the most annoying characteristics of Professional football is the blatant disingenuous almost daily pronouncements from the Commissioner and his henchman. 'Best interests of football' really means 'best interests of the owners', 'Best interests of the players' means "Best interests of the players to follow what ever policies the owners dictate' and "Best interests of the fans" means "Best interests of the owners to pile up more money via the same way politicians pile up more votes----via slick propaganda and manipulation of fan/voter prejudices. They even brag that one of their teams is a publicly owned team. Really, in what way does the public have any control over the team? The stocks are worthless, have no value, and I am not aware of any single public official who can impact on the operation of the team or any mechanism whereby the residents of the state can exert any control. So just who is this public? Still, the model is a vast improvement over the rest of the teams.
One thing is for sure. Professional football cannot go on much longer on two fronts: the injury situation, with players today much stronger, bigger, and faster, than ever before; and no enterprise can exist with little regulation, no limits, and no competition for too much longer. Greed that has no limits, no regulation to define when 'enough is enough', and an arrogance that comes with any monopoly will bring professional football down with time and the 'emperors' will end up naked in their pretenses.
